The present invention generally relates to connectors, and more particularly to a connector which is used for connecting a telephone set to a telephone line.
Conventionally, connectors having fundamental parts thereof standardized in conformance with the FCC standard or the like are used to connect telephone sets to telephone lines. An example of the connector of this kind has a box-shaped housing with a plug inserting opening on the front surface of the housing. When the telephone set is connected to the telephone line, a plug which is provided on an end of a telephone line is inserted into the plug inserting opening. A plurality of contact pins are embeddedly provided on the housing so that one end of each of the contact pins project from the bottom of the housing to constitute a terminal part and the other end of each of the contact pins project within the plug inserting opening of the housing to constitute a contact part. A plurality of electrodes provided on the plug make contact with the contact part when the plug is inserted into the plug inserting opening of the housing. The connector is placed on a printed circuit board which is secured to a main telephone body, in such a manner that the plug inserting opening is exposed to the outside of the main telephone body. The terminal part constituted by the contact pins projecting from the bottom of the housing is soldered to respective circuit patterns on the printed circuit board.
In this arrangement of the conventional connector, the overall height of the connector in use is the sum of the height of the connector itself and the thickness of the printed circuit board, and is relatively large. For this reason, it is difficult to accommodate connector within a limited space. Consequently, there is a problem in that it is difficult to accommodate the connector within a telephone set having a thin configuration.